Saturday, August 05, 2017

It's Not Heavy Statistics, But The Numbers Are Telling Us Something

One microdrama this week came from a leaked document revealing that
the Justice Department may staff up an investigation into “intentional
race-based discrimination” in college admissions. The left is accusing
Justice of dismantling racial preferences, though acceptance practices
at elite universities deserve more scrutiny, particularly regarding
Asian-American applicants.

In 2015 a coalition of more than 60
Asian-American groups filed a complaint with the Justice Department
Civil Rights Division that alleges admissions discrimination at Harvard
University, and the details are striking. In 1993 about 20% of Harvard
students were Asian-American, and that figure has barely budged over two
decades, even as the Asian-American share of the U.S. population has
grown rapidly. Harvard’s admitted class of 2021 is 22% Asian-American,
according to data on the university’s website, and the numbers are
roughly consistent at Princeton, Yale and other Ivy League schools.

Compare
that with California, where a 1990s referendum banned the state’s
public universities from considering race as an admissions factor. The
share at University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles
tops 30%, as the complaint notes. At the private California Institute of
Technology, which by choice does not consider race as a factor, more
than 40% of students were Asian-American in 2013, up from 26% in 1993.

Also
notable is research on how much more competitive Asian-Americans must
be to win entry into Harvard or other hallowed progressive halls. All
else being equal, Asian-American must score 140 points higher on the SAT
than a white counterpart, 270 points higher than a Hispanic student,
and 450 points higher than a black applicant, according to 2009 research
from Princeton sociologist
Thomas Espenshade
and co-author Alexandria Walton Radford.

Schools are allowed to consider race as a “plus” factor, and Supreme Court Justice
Anthony Kennedy
in recent years has muddied the legal standards, most recently in Fisher v. University of Texas.
But the Asian-American disparities look like evidence of de facto
admissions quotas that the High Court has explicitly declared illegal.